Marine Le Pen, former chair of the French Right-populist Rassemblement National and the leading opposition politician in France, has been convicted by a Paris court of embezzling public funds. She has received a four-year prison sentence, two of which are suspended and two of which are to be served under house arrest with an ankle monitor. Le Pen will also have to pay a fine of €100,000, and she has been deprived of the right to run for political office for five years. Le Pen is leading the polls in the race to succeed Emanuel Macron in the coming 2027 presidential election, with the support of over one-third of the French electorate. With this sentence, the Paris criminal court hopes to remove the leading candidate from the race entirely. Le Pen can of course appeal, but her prospects are uncertain and a favourable ruling may be years away.
Le Pen was convicted alongside eight other members of the Rassemblement National/Front National and 12 parliamentary aides. She did not personally embezzle funds or enrich herself from EU coffers. Rather, prosecutors accuse her of directing aides to undertake work for her party while they were receiving salaries from the European Parliament. They claim this happened between 2004 and 2016, and that Le Pen and her associates misappropriated over €4 million in this way. While nobody doubts the substance of the accusations, what Le Pen did was far from unusual and the sentence just seems ridiculous to me. Many European parliamentary representatives have used staff paid from parliamentary budgets for party projects – including Franziska Brantner, the present Co-Chair of German Green Party. Until recently this was a common practice, and even now the distinction between party and parliamentary work is not always easy to maintain, and both routinely and deliberately blurred.
Le Pen is a complex political figure, and she has not always been an unvarnished force for good. Her campaign to normalise the Rassemblement National (known as ‘dédiabolisation‘, or ‘de-demonisation’) came at devastating cost to Alternative für Deutschland during last year’s European elections. In service of casting the Rassemblement National as something less than ‘far Right’, Le Pen and her party attacked the AfD for its rhetoric surrounding ‘remigration’ and even seized upon Maximilian Krah’s inept remarks about the Waffen-SS to kick the entire AfD delegation out of the Identity and Democracy faction of the European Parliament.
In the wake of these fireworks, some German commentators have suggested that the AfD undertake a de-demonisation campaign of its own, for example by distancing itself from nationalist AfD politicians like Björn Höcke. Le Pen’s fate shows that programmes of optical moderation and attempts to claim the political centre provide no salvation. The European political establishment only claims to be worried about ‘the extreme Right’; its true anxieties attach to its hold on power and nothing else.
Le Pen’s sentence confirms an ominous anti-democratic tactic emerging across Europe, namely attacks on the passive suffrage of opposition politicians. At the start of this month, the Central Election Bureau of Romania withdrew Călin Georgescu’s right to run for office there, months after Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner in the first round of the Presidential elections and the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the vote. In Germany, schemes to attack passive suffrage have also been gaining ground, with the CDU and SPD openly planning to use this measure against anyone convicted more than once of the broad and ill-defined speech offence of ‘incitement’.
This is very bad, and I fear it is a symptom of something much worse.
Europe is entering a new political era and its rulership class is rapidly aligning itself around a new great cause. Why Europe even needs to have great causes is a powerful question, but since 1945 we cannot get away from them. The Cold War was a very long and a very great cause indeed. When that evaporated, we moved on to the next great cause, which was climatism. This achieved a dubious peak during Donald Trump’s first term and drew momentum from a performative moral one-upmanship directed against his administration. Now we are at the start of Trump’s second term, climatism is collapsing even more rapidly than I expected, and European politicians are taking up the fight against “the Right” instead. Climatism was yesterday, antifascism is today.
You will notice that each of these great causes is directed against an enemy. In the Cold War we hoped to defeat communism and the Warsaw Pact. Afterwards, our elites were free as never before to incorporate Leftist themes (the communist threat having vanished), and so they took up arms against standard socialist villains like the energetically loathed if relentlessly under-realised ‘capitalists’, who destroy the world with unchecked industrial production and who must be brought to heel by the regulatory state. I very much fear that the new villains of the antifascist programme are simply the people, who are destroying ‘democracy’ with their unchecked personal aspirations, prejudices and wayward beliefs. They will try to bring us to heel too, via what tactics we can only imagine.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It’s actually best to click the link and read the full article for context because it’s easy to jump to conclusions and minimize this young lady’s experience. I think the thing this guy did wrong, well, after basically singling her out to act in such an inappropriate and unprofessional manner, was to ‘ghost’ her and stop giving her any shifts. When he overheard her on the CCTV confiding in colleagues about how creepy he was being only with her that should’ve been a wake-up call that he was out of order and over stepping the mark as her boss. He should’ve stopped being a sleaze, apologized for his behaviour, which obviously wasn’t welcome and made her feel uncomfortable, then he should’ve went ahead and treat her exactly like her colleagues.
So at first I was like, ”Only in Clown World does somebody think getting an extra 20 quid is harassment”, but there’s much more to it than that. I think the reason, as stated in the article, she went ahead for the sexual harassment claim as opposed to unfair dismissal is that she hadn’t worked there long enough to make a claim for the latter. He’d done it with a previous female staff member but if the staff just up and leave then he’s never going to be held to account and change his behaviour going forward. Well it looks like he might think twice before being a perv with any future staff and abusing his authority, which he obviously enjoyed doing.
She tried both sexual harrasment and unfair dismissal. The latter complaint was dismissed because she hadn’t been working there for long enough.
I concluded just from this article that the guy’s a slimeball.
Me too
I’m not keen on the micro regulation of workplace behaviour but other than leaving to find a job with a better employer I think her options were limited unless she is in a trade union but they probably wouldn’t hold much sway in a small business
I think what she did took guts, more guts than merely leaving and basically allowing him to behave this way continuously with future victims he singles out. By winning her case she’s presumably broken the cycle and the creep will think twice in future. He was blatantly grooming her, telling her to keep the fact he gave her extra cash a secret etc, so I’m very glad she listened to her intuition and didn’t accept any lifts from him. People, females especially, need to listen to their gut instinct ( their lizard brain, in reality ) and if something doesn’t feel right then it usually isn’t. Being all agreeable and thinking something won’t happen to you can be your downfall.
I generally agree and you make some good points. She could have left and left some online reviews calling him out- I like the idea of the market taking care of things like this- but I accept it’s not easy. I don’t think I’ve paid anyone (male or female) at work a compliment about their eyes or anything similar in the 38 years I have been there. I may remark on them looking smart or well but nothing beyond that. I don’t think winking necessarily constitutes inappropriate behaviour but it depends on the context and in this case it’s part of a much wider pattern.
Well-said. The ever-insightful Gavin de Becker would certainly agree with you.
Well look at the title; ”Winking at a female employee can be sexual harassment”, and we are presumably supposed to form a certain opinion based on the insinuation of that sentence. So that’s why I thought I’d beat the resident misogynists and advise people to read the DM article in order to get the bigger picture before making a judgment, seeing as it was a lot more than some over-sensitive snowflake girl taking offense and playing her ”victim card” because her boss winked at her.
The article was almost certainly written by someone who wanted to support the women’s side of the story. Stripped of all the decorations, it’s (almost certainly) “middle-aged married guy making clumsy attempts to flirt with a much younger woman and floundering spectacularly at that”. Which immediately leads to the question: “What did the women do to motivate this guy to make a total ass of himself in such a hopeless and expensive way?”
Viewed objectively, he didn’t do anything justifying actual outrage and she never really told him off, she just made fun of him when she thought he wouldn’t notice because she hadn’t noticed the CCTV camera. She then voluntarily stopped working there “for her exams” and called the guy again afterwards as she wanted to have more shifts. Having finally wised up to the situation and with a bit of distance, he chose to let the matter rest at that. And then, she sued him, ie, not because of what he allegedly did before but because he wasn’t willing to throw more money in her direction.
NB: That’s an attempt to the tell the side of the story the Mail left out based on the facts and some not entirely unlikely conjectures. As I don’t know any of the people, I do not claim that it must be true, just that it could.
Indeed, the clickbait title of this article is extremely misleading.
Sexual harassment like racial discrimination cases have no upper limit on compensation.
I agree the guy is clearly a slime ball and he should have apologised to her once he saw and heard the CCTV, and that would have been that. But no: he was exploiting the very good law which avoids having the judicial system tied up with petty disagreements between employee and employer in the probationary period, during which either side can walk away without having to give any reason or notice. He could have his way with her (or so he thought) then just say she wasn’t very good at her job and that’s that, he would be off scott-free. I am sure he’s tried it (and maybe had it) many times. It’s a kind of justice that this lady frustrated his efforts in the future… I hope.
And I hope Ms Almussawi invests her damages wisely.
I also hope that her win will not make potential employers see her as too big a risk as “a litigious little so and so” and exclude her on that basis alone.
BUT, and it’s a big BUT:
People really need to learn that sticks and stones…. etc. For a woman, this should be to learn how to dismiss cackhanded/sleazy advances. Most guys get it and walk off, tail between their legs.
She was not raped. Not even close. She seemed to deal with him well enough, and although I am not dismissing how stressful it is for many young women who have never had to deal with a lecherous bloke, she should have just left and avoided all the stress of the tribunal. Those waitressing jobs are two a penny.
But like I say, I hope she invests the money wisely. And that he realises what a sleazy twat he probably is.
And it’s probably too late to hope that this won’t open the floodgates to a load of vexatious and horrible accusations by manipulative “victims”, of either sex…
This.
Yes, thank you for pointing out such an important nuance here. Context matters, and they guy was clearly being a creep.
History Debunked: Why are so many older white men angry!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=585JGCCMZBo
Jenna Almussawi? Wejdi Moussa? I bet their ancestors were not at Bannockburn or Culloden.
Maybe if their ancestors had been at Culloden, Jenna and Wejdi wouldn’t have come into existence at all…
Were your ancestors at Stamford Bridge? Or Crecy?
Come on this dude’s obviously Welsh.
What a winker.
Just change one vowel in “winker”, lol.
its a joke. And explaining why a joke is a joke is never funny.
I suspect most DS readers understood without having it telegraphed to them.
It’s a relief to find the comments align with my views on this story. The tribunal found its way to the right answer in my opinion. Mr Moussa sounds like the kind of dangerous bully that the anti-harrassment laws should be keeping in check.
Very true
My wife’s former employer once said to her on the way back from the Bank “Do you fancy a white sheet job?”. She didn’t know what one was, when he told her she laughed and brushed it off. He always wanted a bit of the extra with her. No big deal, he never got it. I wonder how much she could have claimed?
We were talking about wolf whistles and so on the other night as it happens. She used to get the builders at the company whistle her and suggestive comments. It ended when she got older. She was quite flattered when younger and never took it seriously.
Women can be far worse than men. When I was an apprentice the women used to grab and twist everything they could when you were going up a ladder. I found it funny, some guys found it distressing and actually frightening; 50 women in a small section is intimidating.
Where is the line between acceptable and abuse? Today it seems nothing is acceptable from a bloke but a woman, ever seen a gaggle of them on a night out or at a strip show? They are worse than any bunch of guys I ever knew.
Perhaps the difference is in intent? The White Sheet Job was semi-serious (its a quicky in a Hotel), the women grabbing my balls was jokey in intent. This guy, well, he seemed to use it as a weapon and that is very different.
It’s not only women. As far as I can tell, everything is acceptable provided the person who did it wasn’t a heterosexual man, because that’s the only ‘serious’ case, all others are “just fun”. But as someone who has been a target of this from both men and women (men much more frequently, obviously) I can’t help asking “Whose fun?”
The entire concept of sexual harassment has well and truly jumped the shark now.
That said, if you read the FULL story, the guy really was overstepping his bounds, being a creep and in the wrong in this particular case. There is, after all, a little detail called CONTEXT.